138 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOOY [Bull. 137 



villages is given as 80 in 1738, 20 in 1750, 80 in 1760, 40 in 1761, 100 

 in 1772, 150 in 1792, and 170 in 1799, while the total population, ex- 

 clusive of slaves, was returned by the census of 1832-33 as 804, of whom 

 485 were in Hilibi itself, 131 in Oktahasasi, and 188 in Kitcopataki. 



HiTCHin 



This was considered the "mother town" of a considerable group 

 known to themselves as Atcik-hata, living in what is now southern 

 Georgia and northern Florida. It appears first in the De Soto nar- 

 ratives under the name Ocute, as a province and chief on the lower 

 course of Ocmulgee River. The Spaniards set up a wooden cross in 

 the main square of the Ocute village, and, if this is the province 

 described by Garcilaso de la Vega under the name Cofa, it was there 

 that the invaders left their only piece of ordnance. In 1597 it was 

 visited again by a soldier named Gaspar de Salas and two Franciscan 

 missionaries and seems to have been in approximately the same place. 

 When we hear of it again, near the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, it is still upon the Ocmulgee, but higher up at the place known as 

 Ocmulgee Old Fields, where is now Macon. According to a legend 

 recorded by Wm. Bartram, this was where the Creek Confederation 

 was founded. After the Yamasee War, they moved to a point well 

 down the Chattahoochee but later settled farther up, below the Kasihta 

 and on the same side of the river. Hawkins gives a description of 

 their town as he found it in 1799 and informs us that there were also 

 two branch villages on and near Flint River, named Little Hitchiti 

 and Tutalosi, or the "Fowl Town." In 1820 we hear of a group of six 

 towns known as the Fowl Towns, but some of these were probably 

 not branches of Hitchiti. The census of 1832-33 gives a Hitchiti 

 village named Hihaje. After removing to the west, the Hitchiti 

 settled in the central part of the Creek Nation about the present 

 Hichita Station and near Okmulgee. Part of these people migrated 

 to Florida and those who subsequently moved to Oklahoma with the 

 Seminole settled in the northern part of the Seminole territory, where 

 they maintained a ceremonial ground of their own for a considerable 

 period. 



EitcMti population. — The number of warriors in Hitchiti, apart 

 from other towns speaking the language, appears as 60 in 1738, 15 

 in 1750, 50 in 1760, 40 in 1761, and in 1772 about 90. In 1821 Young 

 estimates for all the Fowl Towns a population of 300. In 1832 

 Hitchiti and its branch village Hihaje had a population of 381, ex- 

 clusive of 20 Negro slaves. 



The number of warriors in the group of towns speaking the 

 Hitchiti language, exclusive of those in Florida, is : in 1738, 403 ; in 

 1750, 205; in 1760, 620; and in 1761, 370; the total population being, 

 in 1832, 2,036. This includes Hitchiti, Tamathli, Osochi, Chiaha, 

 Okmulgee, Apalachicola, Sawokli, Oconee, and Okitiyakani. 



